his some hidden meaning and agree that it could again happen to either of them out of the blue. "The Seventh Man" A mid-fifties man dubbed "the seventh man" tells a story to a group about his childhood. When he was ten and lived in a small, seaside town most likely in Shizuoka Prefecture, he had a close friend named K. One day, a typhoon hits the area and while their town is in the eye, they go down to the beach; the seventh man is told by his father to return to the house as soon as winds pick up. While examining items of the beach, the seventh man sees a wave huge wave form and warns K by screaming to him but his warning falls on deaf ears; K is swallowed by the wave while the seventh man, on higher ground, is spared. A second wave forms but dies the moment before it is to hit the seventh man and in that moment he sees an apparition of K reaching out to him before he faints. The seventh man wakes up a week later in the care of his family and learns that K disappeared without a trace. Many years go on without any evidence of K's remains coming to light; further, the seventh man is haunted by nightmares of K drowning and by the fact that no one outwardly blames him for K's disappearance. By the end of the year, he moves away to Komoro to get away from the town; he stays in the city for more than forty years but is still haunted by nightmares of K. He returns to the town and the beach where K disappeared in his fifties and goes through a storage shed which contains K's paintings. Despite the anguish he feels with merely possessing them he takes it with him back home to Komoro. He studies them and realizes that K's apparition was not looking at him with hatred and resentment all those years. He returns to the beach once more and surrenders himself to the water by falling face-first into the ocean. The seventh man finishes the story by telling his audience to not turn our backs on fear and not close our eyes when it strikes. "The Year of Spaghetti" A man only cooks and eats spaghetti in 1971. He sometimes imagines that people are knocking at his